Concerning Human Understanding
by Nookienostradamus
Summary: T-Minus the Touch That Changed Everything, John had slipped once again into the invariance of his relationship with Sherlock. The two of them existed in the centre of a backward universe in which complaints were voiced and praise kept close to the vest to be later weaponized. (Sequel to L'Esprit de L'Escalier)


John Watson lay on his bed, propped half-upright on a mess of flat, doubled-over pillows as early grey daylight inched over the curtain rod. He crushed one hand between his head and the wooden headboard, feeling the roll of the joints through skin as he moved, letting the digits lose sensation by slow degrees.

He had little use for comfort.

The other hand, the left, he examined. The low light obscured the fair hair that swept up in a whorl from his wrist, blurred the convoluted thickenings atop his knuckles. No age spots, not yet. It had been that hand that, two weeks prior, Sherlock had touched. The first time since their initial handshake that their flesh had met with intent. Sherlock had splayed his candelabra of white fingers, one cool pad each on the proximal phalanges, and there let pass a single moment of rest: quite the achievement for someone so restless his bones knocked.

Now, John thought, the marked hand felt heavy, huge. His interest lay in the fact that, at the time, the touch had not been weighty, only welcome. The pain now was that of realisation, drawn out of ignorance to sting where it had gone near-unnoticed before.

He flexed his hand, testing dexterity. One knuckle popped with the sound of shattering china. No, the slamming of a cupboard told him otherwise. The slam and the swear. Sherlock, sure of hand and of mind, had dropped a teacup in the flat's tiny kitchen.

The sound made John sleepy, for no reason he could identify. Sherlock would kick the big pieces underneath the refrigerator and leave the rest. Shoes or slippers in the kitchen for the indefinite future, or until Mrs. Hudson got fed up and hoovered.

John let his eyelids close over the encroaching, clouded daylight. His left hand rested on his leg. At some point, perhaps when he rolled to his side, the right hand would float down as well, numb.

***  
Traffic at the surgery that morning was slow, as was everything in winter. They'd need to wait for the next bank holiday for a bump in patient numbers. People behaved stupidly outside of the confines of routine.

Which was why John was wary. Over the past two weeks, T-Minus the Touch That Changed Everything, he'd slipped once again into the invariance of his relationship with Sherlock. The two of them existed in the centre of a backward universe in which complaints were voiced and praise kept close to the vest to be later weaponized. As if truth were harm and tetchy uncertainty much more like home.

Those looking in from outside their closed system saw only nebulae, the violent life and death of conflict and cooperation. They had, after all, probably been subject on more than one occasion to the fringe of his and Sherlock's interactions, where circumstance undulated violently enough to throw the uninitiated across the room.

Nobody else could fathom that the binding agent between John and Sherlock was their routine. Within it, they stood at arms' length in a courtly dance defined as much by its careful orbit as by its nuclear attraction.

"Going on holiday, then?" Dr. Louisa Fenton asked.

John started then drew his hand over the lower half of his face, as if to erase the guilt of a wistful look. "You must know something I don't."

"No," she said, dipping both her chin and her eyelids. It was a gesture with which John was becoming familiar, implying that she thought she was about to be called out. "I only meant that... well, your eyes are sort of faraway-looking. You seem a bit checked out, that's all."

"Oh, I get it," John said, smiling. "Yes, holiday in my head." He tapped his temple as punctuation.

"Is everything all right?" she asked.

"Sure, sure. Just didn't get much sleep last night." He added, "Thanks for asking."

Louisa was a more-than-competent physician with a hell of a bedside manner, but had an unfortunate reticence around colleagues. She often declined to offer opinions to Sarah or even John, who considered himself the clinic's red-haired bastard. He would like to lend her a bit of Sherlock's blithe boldness, if he didn't think the man would simply grow it back, redoubled, budding like a unicellular organism.

Louisa nodded and left, in all likelihood unsatisfied with his explanation.

There again, in the silence, the feathery feet of welcome and unwelcome thought. Without noticing, he picked at a cuticle until it bled.

A hard noise cut through his contemplation. John stared at the phone, listening to its vibrations thrum through the metal of the desk, ring after ring, until the device threatened to rattle off the side and onto the floor. He picked it up just before it went to voicemail. "Watson."

"John, it's Greg Lestrade."

This would be about Sherlock. As much as acknowledging the man's existence gave him apparent licence to gallop roughshod over John's life: in the flat, outside of the flat, in his damned head. Precipitating from the airwaves to fall on him like ash. Sherlock was the typhoon, the conflagration. John was the aftermath, wherein all the injured parties begged redress.

"I don't have a great deal of time at the moment. We're very busy." John looked around the empty surgery, silent but for the hum of electronics.

"It's about Sherlock."

Were John's life a quiz show, a halo of bells and lights would have just come alive around his head. "What's he done?"

"He's turned down a case," said Lestrade.

"As far as I know, that's his prerogative." John pinched the skin of his forehead between thumb and middle finger until he could feel the deepening of the twin furrows that over the past five years had set up shop just above his eyebrows. "He's turned down plenty of cases before. You're saying that as if it's unusual."

"It _is_ unusual," Lestrade said. "This one at least. Don't know if you've noticed, but I've gotten better at sussing out which cases our mutual friend won't just reject out of hand."

"Sherlock will always surprise you," said John, without conviction.

"No, he bloody won't. You and I both know if something ever really knocked a cog loose up in that great, inflated head we'd lose him forever."

On a rational level, John knew the implications of the phrase were entirely different coming from Lestrade's mouth. But it sank a plumb-bob of cool dread into his gullet nonetheless. John choked around it, trying to force words.

He didn't need to. Lestrade had not finished his indignant soliloquy. "I swear I had this one," he said. "Directly up Sherlock's alley, this is. A couple from Germany just drops dead of acute carbon monoxide poisoning in the middle of a home and garden convention. Nobody else was affected."

"Dichloromethane?" John asked.

"That's the thing!" It came over the phone as a shout, triumphant.

John pictured an index finger pointed toward the ceiling, describing miniature tick-marks in the air, the muscles in the hand and forearm rigid with excitement. Imagining Sherlock's mannerisms transposed onto someone else's body was distinctly unsettling.

"Britain and the E.U. have had a ban in place on dichloromethane in paint strippers since 2010. These were all vendors from member states. So if that was the cause, it had nothing to do with the vendors at the home show."

"Well, he must have had a reason to turn the case down," John said.

"Talk to him, will you? Thanks." Lestrade ended the call before John could respond.

It was only when he placed the phone on the desk again that he registered the ache, its epicenter deep in the flesh just below his thumb. Temblors of captive blood returned to his pinched fingertips, making him realize just how hard he had been gripping the phone.

John sighed and flicked at it, a flash of reassuring pain, sending the device skimming over a few inches of dented metal. Before, he'd always felt cluttered, somehow, crowded out of his own head as Sherlock's pent-up thrumming jounced about the very molecules in the air of the flat. Until the next case, the surgery had been a grateful oasis of boredom. No, that was the wrong word entirely. It was tainted in connotation, bonded now with volatility. The term John was searching for was "peace," maybe.

Or "void."

Only now, John heard the ringing of that unoccupied space, flaunting its emptiness. He would give anything not to hear that, not to lie like a long, black powder trail from the steps of 221B Baker Street through the London byways, sparking at the periphery.

Inside an evening already dark and chilly, John walked home along that path, taking each scattered curve. Not burning, but ready to.

John toed his shoes off just at the top of the staircase. The flat smelt of the must of enclosure, heavy drapes drawn against the day hoarding its lived-in scent. Comfort. Familiarity.

Cigarettes.

Harsh ones, like Gauloises. John rolled his eyes, but behind the quotidien gesture was the sharp panic of separation, of Sherlock drawing away from his influence. He might as well try to grasp those tendrils of smoke, pull them particle by particle from the curtains and cram them back down that marble-white throat to quash the reek of the unattainable.

For a moment, John considered going down to the pub for a solitary drink and some fresher air, but the thoughts of Sherlock in his absence were maddening. As if points of commonality, of connection, could rattle loose in the interim and fall clicking like pins, just loudly enough to notice.

"Sherlock?"

No answer.

He went into the kitchen. Sherlock, sat at the table in his dressing gown, tapping the point of a pencil on the paper of a tablet on which had been drawn a single arcing line.

"Have you brought more patches?" he asked.

"Why didn't you answer when I called?" John asked.

"You knew I was here. Where could I have gone? Unless I'd turned to smoke and slipped through the keyhole."

"Hm," John said. "Smoke."

"Have you brought them?" Sherlock asked again.

"I didn't know you'd run out," John said. "You can't smoke _and_ use the patches; you'll kill yourself."

The tempo of the pencil taps increased to double-time.

"I've had a call from Lestrade," said John. "You've turned down the case?"

"Of course I have. It's idiotic."

"Sounded pretty interesting to me," John said.

Sherlock's face folded into an expression of pure disdain, though it was directed down at the near-unmarked pad of paper.

"Right. You know best," John said, allowing exasperation free rein over the words. "I'll be in the sitting room, then."

He'd barely opened his laptop when Sherlock swung around the partition, dressing gown fluttering, his long and pale leg a Doric column hinting at a finial of fine silk pants. A single curl of hair greased into a wild forelock over his left eyebrow. John swallowed hard and looked back at the screen.

"So now you're blogging about my _not_ taking a case?" Sherlock asked.

"I thought I'd check my email, actually. Have you bathed in the last week?"

Sherlock waved away the words with a dismissive swipe, sending them tumbling unheeded into the thick air of the flat.

"Why does it matter in the first place?" asked John. "You don't read my blog."

"I do."

"When?"

"Over your shoulder." As if to illustrate, Sherlock measured two steps forward and craned his neck, mimicking the peeping of a guileless schoolboy. "You're not blogging."

"I told you I wasn't." Matching him quibble for quibble, John lowered the screen of the laptop nearly to the point of locking down into "sleep" mode.

"I saw words," Sherlock said.

"Words are a safe assumption."

"Words are always a safe assumption with you, John."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"There was 'strike' in combination with 'Tottenham,'" Sherlock said. "In that combination it can only be football."

"Can you let me have my inconsequential pleasures, please?"

"Good, then. Pleasures shouldn't have consequence," said Sherlock, reaching once again toward John's hand where it rested on the laptop's case.

John startled away, but Sherlock caught the screen before it clicked shut on the body of the computer. He pried it open, and John's face was once again illuminated, words filling his eyes.

He saw not a one of them.

Sherlock crossed the sitting room floor, heels silent at first on the Turkish carpet then knocking the planks of the hardwood in adagio time. The couch sighed out dust as he collapsed on it.

Hours later, Sherlock hadn't moved. John had studied the way Sherlock's vertebrae interrupted the drape of fabric covering his back, counting the knobs at least six times between staring at online news feeds, not absorbing a jot of information. One soiled, days-old nicotine patch clung to Sherlock's calf, with God-knows-how-many others spotting the hidden planes of his body.

It was a wonder he wasn't in respiratory arrest, though in this in-between-cases state he was as good as comatose anyway.

The thought that he wanted to peel off each patch and place his lips against the damp circle of skin below made John blush so furiously his vision swam.

Picking out a path once again up the causeway of Sherlock's spine, another thought occurred to John, one that nearly made him throw his laptop across the room.

His blog, in a way, was his sole manner of interacting truthfully with Sherlock, who in turn culled only the bits and pieces his scattered attention would allow. Over John's shoulder. Secondhand—a relationship in cipher, uncrackable simply because the key was incomplete.

The real humiliation lay in the fact that it had been Sherlock who had reached out, translated words into touch, while John had thought speaking sufficient.

John may be the less clever of the two and the less famous, but he'd like to think he hadn't lost his soldier's mentality. And he'd be damned if he wasn't going to be braver than Sherlock Holmes.

The absurdity of it all forced a laugh from his throat. Reflex clenched his cautious hands in automatic defense against any rash move.

A laugh absent any humour always sounds like someone else has made it, even when you feel it in your own throat. Indeed, Sherlock stirred on the couch as if the sounds belonged to him, his sleep already fitful and thin on the best of nights. Fingers still curled tight against his palms, John watched the edge of the blue silk dressing gown draw back like ebb tide over Sherlock's upper thigh as he settled again, one foot placed on the floor and the other slung over the arm of the couch. Those feet... the painful-looking sculpted arch cradling the same kind of aesthetic threat as a cathedral's groin vault. The skin, pale and pulling on light sources in the room though the curtains were closed and the blue glow of the computer gone. Webbed through with visible veins from the long dorsal plane to the tapering ankle. Too improbable to be involved in the production of those long, certain strides.

No. _No._

That was precisely the crux of John's misperception, and he felt a fool to have kept it up so long. Sherlock was not fragile. Not a bit of it.

It would seem so, of course, even to those closest to him (and who was closer than the man who had shared his flat for nearly two years?). Sherlock was knocked about from case to case as if he had no weight at all, sinking in near-airless drift in the spaces between them, hands languid. For the sake of the falling, through a screen of his own helplessness, John had failed to see the potential for flight frozen in bright points on Sherlock's fingertips. Conserving energy, waiting to be buffeted again.

No, Sherlock Holmes was not fragile. Only directionless until impelled. He caught and absorbed and multiplied every ounce of the energy a new venture threw at him. And slipped like water over its edge when all was done. Primed. Anticipatory.

Stupid, blind John—to use the waiting period to wait himself, treading on tiptoe. Standing to the side with arms extended in anticipation of the event that would propel Sherlock into them, instead of taking hold and _hauling_ at what John knew could bear far more pressure than he wielded.

Running the heel of his hand against the hair falling over his ear (a few more strands of grey each week), John stood and laughed again, with intent. The sound impacted the wall above Sherlock's sleeping form.

He snorted and his eyes snapped open. John had not meant to wake him, exactly.

"Have you lost your mind?" Sherlock asked.

"What?"

"It's a diagnostic query, John," he said. "You're standing in the middle of the sitting room staring at nothing and laughing. An observer could reasonably assume you're _non compos mentis_."

_I'd hardly call it staring at nothing_, John thought, and the moment passed before he could say it. "Go to bed, Sherlock."

"I was in bed. Or at least sleeping."

"Don't let me stop you," said John.

"Bit too late for that. Are you going to stand there all night?" Sherlock did not give him a chance to answer, righting himself on the couch and then heaving up, tottering a bit on those impossible, impossible feet. "Regardless, I think I will go to my room. Though I don't expect to have any more sleep tonight."

"Well, whatever you do," John said, "good night."

Sherlock's brow knotted at the same time he yanked at the ties of the dressing gown, modesty a contrast to his frankly immodest searching of John's face. It made John want to offer up yet another laugh, right into the air between them. He only smiled.

Then Sherlock passed, taking with him the scent of sleep, which somehow transformed the rubbish-bin odor of old cigarette smoke into something almost pleasant.

Looking at the empty couch, the leather cushions inhaling again to smooth the evidence of Sherlock's presence there into shallow, shadowed dimples, John heard a door slam far behind him.

He felt warmth in his fingertips long before he found that his hands had unclenched, allowing the eager blood to set them alight.

John shook his head. If sleeplessness was on the menu for both of them, he may as well make a pot of tea—strong, the way he liked it, with only a splash of milk. Only two steps onto the kitchen lino and he felt a sharp bite of pain on his left foot, in the space where an arch might have been if his solid, flat sole did not so closely hug the ground.

John swore and lifted his foot for a look. The fragment of teacup clung to the edge of his sock where it had been torn. He hadn't quite enough time to pry it off before blood began to filter into the rift in his flesh. Bloody sock and white shard were flung aside, skittering to a rest beside the oven.

"Dammit, Sherlock!"

His circulation quickened yet again, tracing the swell of endorphins. John's face and hands grew hot; the blood from the rent in his foot bloomed and splashed onto the dirty floor.

"Sherlock!" he shouted again.

No answer.

He stumped down the hallway toward Sherlock's bedroom on one foot and only the ball of the other, producing with each step the nauseating feeling of skin meeting and separating like a mouth, toothless and drooling. His progress was made that much worse for the fact that it was a reminder of how he'd hobbled on his bad leg before Sherlock's presence—his offerings—made the pain disappear. The memory made his anger wane a little.

By the time he reached Sherlock's door, he was prickling with sweat underneath his jumper.

Sherlock looked up from his writing desk. "You're bleeding."

"Your powers of observation are unparalleled."

"That should be evident from experience, though I've only told you one thing just now."

"Why don't you tell me why I've stepped on a razor-sharp bit of teacup instead of those bits being in the bin?"

"I forgot about it," Sherlock said.

John hobbled in and sat on the side of the bed.

"You'll get blood everywhere!" Sherlock said. It was almost a whine, if his voice could have truly reached such an irritating register. "You've probably ruined the runner in the hallway. Mrs. Hudson will—"

"You'll just have to clean it up," John said. "Will you look at this, please?"

"Me?" Sherlock said. "Look at it?"

"It's your fault, isn't it?"

"You're the doctor, John. You're far more qualified to inspect a wound, of all things."

John's face burned, the hormone-spiked blood lighting up his hairline, the tips of his ears. "I—uh. I want you to touch me."

Sherlock's jaw dropped. If the amount of time that he was rendered speechless by something John said had doubled to only a single second since the last instance, John marked it a victory.

Then he was all composure—or scorn, which was what passed for composure on Sherlock's face. "You'll likely need stitches. Could you please stop bleeding on my rug?"

As much as he wanted to, to stay and fight it out against Sherlock's impossible logic, John knew he was right. The cut was deep enough that stitches were probably in order and he had no supplies in the flat but some butterfly closures that might not stick because due to the blood.

In the end, John ended up with his tea towel-wrapped foot stuffed halfway into his shoe as he took a taxi to the after-hours surgery just past Regent's Park. He declined to take his old cane from the corner where it lay propped and gathering dust.

His forehead close enough to the side window that he could feel the cold outside filtering into the incense-draped warmth of the cab, teeth clenched against the jounce and jostle, John laughed again, to himself. By nature, he wasn't a man to be glad of the intervention of circumstance, but this time he was glad that it _was_ circumstance and not his own vacillation that had drawn out the strain between them.

From his response in the bedroom, as John bled openly before him, he had to conclude that Sherlock was at a loss regarding what to do with the whole situation. By his earlier deductions, John was also forced to conclude that the shock of it wouldn't kill Sherlock.

Deductions. The word made him smile. The notion of an uncertain Sherlock made him smile even more.

John thought back to Lestrade's words the day prior: carrying a warning about disrupting a delicate balance. There came a near-shameful rush of pride on the heels of that recollection, making John believe the detective inspector didn't know his friend half as well as he thought he did.

In any case, there would be no settling, at least not in the same pattern. The tectonic shift had already occurred; he and Sherlock were in flux, transition inevitable as gravity. All that remained was to see—or rather, decide—whether it would rattle them apart.

And lord but the tremors were inviting. For just a moment, he allowed himself the luxury of imagining the grid lines propping up their parameters separating, pendulous and mutable as pulled taffy. Saw himself beside, around, and _within_ Sherlock—not thinking as he did (no one could do that) but being present at the thoughts' genesis rather than surprised by them like any other interloper on their shared plain.

_John was envious in nearly the same measure as he was aroused. He sighed, letting the smile slip and melt._

A full twenty quid lighter at the door of the emergency clinic, John did not try to walk without limping. His wound opened again and sang in warm red notes into the tea towel.

John had refused the clunky surgical boot, his decision unquestioned because he was a physician himself. A perk of the job, for certain.

It was well past daybreak when he reached, with uneven tread, the steps to 221B. The languid odor of fresh cigarette smoke slid down the staircase and the landing was nearly obscured by a veil through which the sunlight made particles of ash dance.

_Bloody hell._

Regardless of whether it would send Sherlock hissing into his room like a frightened cat, John was determined to throw open a window. It was bad enough to make him wonder if the flat was on fire.

As it turned out, it nearly was. A plume of acrid yellow smoke curled up into the thick air from where more than half of a discarded fag was melting the rug.

"Shit!"

In his haste to struggle over and grind out the fire with his good foot, he almost stepped on Sherlock's hand. That hand, and the rest of Sherlock, was flung in an attitude of subsidence more suited to a fainting couch than a floor. He was dressed, his hair still bath-wet and painting the expanse of his forehead with scalloped flourishes. One shirtsleeve was rolled up, and affixed to the wrist John could see at least two nicotine patches. Bastard must have gone out and got them while he was away.

"Shit, shit, shit."

Feeling the sutures strain, John dropped to a knee just inside the crooked angle formed by Sherlock's torso and outstretched arm. A hand on Sherlock's chest told him that he was still breathing, at least. John yanked at the right cuff, snapping off a button that wheeled along the edge of the rug in a sure trajectory toward the kitchen.

Two more patches on the right wrist. If Sherlock had ever known of the fact of acute nicotine toxicity, it was something he probably shuffled off to a dusty cubby in the manor house of his mind. John had to pinch some of the pale skin nearly to bruising to get below the edge of each plaster and pull it off. He swung his knee over Sherlock's waist, straddling his chest while he worried at the patches on the other arm. One came loose with the sound of tearing tissue paper.

"Ouch," Sherlock said, his voice as foggy as the air in the flat.

"I bloody well hope it hurts," John said.

"Why are you on top of me?"

"I'm trying to save your life, idiot."

"Nonsense." Sherlock tried to raise his head.

John laid a firm hand again on his chest, using it as leverage (a bit regretfully) to bring his leg back over, using momentum to take the final patch with him. Sherlock winced. John crumpled the thing and tossed it well out of reach.

"Don't try to get up," he said. "You'll only topple over again. Give it some time."

"I haven't got time."

"You've got all the time in the world. Not a case in sight," John said. It was a slight reproach. "Just you and your thoughts, driving you mad."

"Precisely. And there's only one alternative to thinking, which is not thinking. This is how I don't think."

"Which if you keep it up will lead to things like _not breathing_," John said.

Sherlock sighed and thumped the back of his skull against a floor mercifully padded by the rug.

John made an effort to gentle his tone. "Look, I can see you're having a bad time."

"You have no idea what's going on in my head," Sherlock said, the condescension losing potency as he delivered the retort from the floor.

"No," John said, "but I know what's going on in _my_ head. You're not an automaton, Sherlock. You have emotions. I see you trying not to read me. To cover up and knock out your own thoughts. And you're failing." He smiled. "If anyone's stuck permanently in his own head it's you. But you're twice as afraid of your own failure as you are anything else. When you look, _really look_, is it so difficult to believe that what's in your head isn't at least a little similar to what's in mine?"

Sherlock shut his eyes, tried to turn over, away from John, who stopped him with a firm grip on a slender forearm decorated with rising welts.

"It won't be the same," Sherlock said.

"What?"

"Everything," he said. "I like stasis. I like the way things are."

"The way things are isn't the way things are anymore," John said. "'Stasis' was chucked out the door two weeks ago. You seem to conveniently forget that I haven't just changed on my own. You changed me. You acknowledged me then you retreated back into your shell because you were frightened."

"I detest uncertainty, John."

"I know, and that's my fault. I was frightened, too."

"And you're not now?"

"No, Sherlock. I'm terrified," John said. "But things can't last this way. We'll shake ourselves to pieces. You're more than halfway there. So I'm taking the burden."

"And how do you propose to—"

John curved his body over the still-prone Sherlock and stifled the protest with his mouth. It was no invasion, just lips pressed against one another, testing the yield. Without breaking contact, John shifted his weight to lift the wrist he still held pinned, and place the hand at his nape.

Sherlock did not move or breathe.

John drew away by a matter of inches. "I was trying to kiss you."

Sherlock's eyes were closed. "Yes, I know. I've seen it done on television. I just need a moment to decide if I like it." His expression was one of intense concentration.

John did not dare touch his face, but studied it instead. "Why don't we just lie here? While you decide."

Sherlock nodded, and he allowed John to push him onto his side, to tuck himself flush behind him inside a sudden bubble of warmth. Half-on and half-off the rug was anything but comfortable, and John was still too nervous to be physically aroused.

But the electricity of the novel bled from Sherlock's skin, somehow amplifying the feel of the fine fabric below John's palms, its slide over the skin beneath. One arm tucked beneath his head, John touched Sherlock only with his right hand, coaxing out a sense of balance. Shoulder, flank, the furrowed field of ribs. John craned his neck forward by minute degrees, stopping short of touching the damp curls, inhaling the scent of shampoo.

Belly, hip with its wild and flaring ridge. Along the ticklish valley where arse meets thigh. Using his delicate surgeon's touch—so at odds it seemed with his stout fingers—to skate over the quadriceps muscle.

There. _There_ was a shudder. Suppressed, John could tell, but it sent all of the suppressed excitement flooding back through his body in a giddy wave from scalp to sole. The sutured divide there throbbed. John's cock throbbed as well. He battled the instinct to draw his hips back, and instead slid forward on the buckling wood of the floor to press against Sherlock until he felt the twin protrusions of his ischiae fitted within his own hipbones.

Pressure and symmetry multiplied the ache.

John bit his lip against any sound. One damp lock twisting from Sherlock's nape traced the swell of John's chin, an involuntary caress.

Passing his palm over the corrugation of silky fabric created by Sherlock's indrawn legs, John at last moved with purpose.

He had steeled himself for disappointment. Instead, he found an erect cock—a firm and full and average cock, much like his own. The exhilaration was so dizzying he had to close his eyes. The entire world filled with the scent of shampoo and Sherlock.

John tightened his grip, only a little. Below his hand rippled a tremor in miniature, the shivering focused to only this point. Sherlock gave a sharp exhalation, almost like a cough. Then there was liquid warmth, a minute easing of firmness.

_Oh, God. He's come_, John thought.

Another huff of breath. John didn't dare remove his hand, but Sherlock shifted out of his grip.

"I think I'll have a lie down," he said. "The patches. I'm not feeling well at all."

Sherlock heaved to his feet, leaving John's arm to fall with a crack of knuckles on the hardwood. Through the sting, John looked up to see Sherlock's face in profile, cheeks and brows the red of a warning flag. He tottered, but with purpose.

"Sherlock," John said.

He did not turn. His stride was abridged, no doubt due in part to the physical discomfort. John had come in his pants a time or two at sixth form, and the press-thighed staggering out of the room had been almost as awful as the half-coherent litany of excuses that trailed him on the way.

"Sherlock!"

A door slammed, a bolt was thrown.

"Dammit."

John rolled onto his stomach, body divided in half by rug and wooden floor, between soft and hard.

It was far from the first time that John had gone to the pub for a solitary, disappointed beer after a solitary, disappointed wank, but the fact of it did little to ease the wallop. He could hope—that is to say, it was possible—that Sherlock would come around in his own way and his own time, and recognize the hurt he'd inflicted on John. He either would or he wouldn't, and there was no foretelling. Sherlock's rationale wasn't a labyrinth, it was a straight path. It was just that no one outside his head could find where it began or ended.

John's conversation with Lestrade over the rebuffed case kept dogging him. The D.I. had insisted that Sherlock was predictable, incapable of surprising anyone. John knew that was as false as any lie ever uttered. Whether it was infuriating or endearing, whatever response emerged from Sherlock's mouth was always a surprise. Whatever the response from his body also a shock.

The thought made him shift, uncomfortable, in his seat, at the same time it proved a balm. The status quo could, in fact, be surprise.

So even as John sulked over his Becks, he mulled over just how much punishment he was willing to take on the back of a fragile precedent. Perhaps, he thought, the routine—their peculiar dynamic—offered more than he'd given it credit for. The second best thing next to comfort was the promise of comfort. That better men than he had driven themselves mad over a second-best thing was a thought John chose to observe and dismiss.

Bravery could tip over into stupidity with only the addition of time, but it wasn't quite there.

John swung off the barstool onto his bad foot. Cushioned by alcohol and anticipation, he hardly felt it at all.

The sitting room was empty, and the air clear when John returned. He shucked his shoes and pulled at a corner of the curtain to let in filtered daylight. It looked as though the clouds had simply moved to the other side of the window, pouring out of the flat and into the sky.

_Smoke through a keyhole._

He trod on the memory of it, on the carcass of a discarded nicotine patch.

If Sherlock had yet emerged from his room, there was no evidence of it. John looked about, contemplating having yet another beer—this time settled in the armchair by the window that looked out on nothing. He decided on tea instead, making certain to don his shoes (injured one last so he wouldn't have to balance on it) before venturing into the kitchen.

In the corner there was a tin dustpan of unknown origin, cradling shards of teacup.

No milk in the refrigerator, though. John smiled, and sighed, and closed the door.

"It still hurts," Sherlock said.

John about leapt out of his skin. "Jesus, Sherlock."

He was in his dressing gown again. "Either that or you're favoring the foot because in the small span of time that it's been injured, doing so has become habit. It's said that one needs two weeks of devoted practice to make or break a habit. Ridiculous. It's shorter work to make a habit of something that involves seeking pleasure or avoiding pain. Rats can learn it in an hour, and that'll tell all you need to know about most people."

"Yes, it still hurts," John said. It was difficult not to smile and he didn't try. "Less now, though, since you've said that."

"I don't see why."

"Let's call it seeking pleasure and avoiding pain," John said.

Sherlock paused only a moment, dark brows tilted inward toward his patrician nose. "You're not talking about your foot."

"No, Sherlock. I'm not."

"I can touch you this time," Sherlock said. His voice was unwavering, belying the statement, it seemed. It was as if he were offering an observation or opinion.

Then again, John supposed he was. "I'd like it if we both touched each other."

Upon contact, as Sherlock reached out, letting his fingertips fall in rain-patterns on John's shoulders, the jumper he wore was suddenly sweltering, heat escaping up the steampipe of his collar and burning his face bright.

He tried not to move or to close his eyes as Sherlock skimmed his palms over biceps, wrists, hands—where Roman candle fingertips sent off sparks.

"You're very warm," said Sherlock. "I don't like this jumper. I never have."

"I'll get rid of it," John said, trying and failing to keep the quaking eagerness from his voice.

"Good." Sherlock crossed his arms, fingers tapping blue silk while John fumbled and shrugged the jumper over his head. It slumped on the floor, whispering.

"Do you want me to show you how I'd like you to touch me?" John asked.

A nod.

He pulled Sherlock's hands away from their protective knot over his chest, and took just a moment to examine them properly. Dimpling over the knuckles, a little dark hair. Sunsets of pink nail beds fading to white. John placed one on each side of his face, surprised at the matching of warmth for warmth.

"Stay right there," John said, and worked at the buttons on his collar. Sherlock did not move away, even if he was studying John a bit like he would an experimental subject. John pulled the shirt away, cuffs still done up, hearing like an echo the clicking retreat of a flying button. Then he moved Sherlock's hands to his chest, to his flanks. If he felt at times he was going a bit podgy from inactivity, it was the least of his concerns at the moment.

Sherlock drew away, but then of his own accord he trailed his fingertips from John's shoulders, down the eaves of his biceps, and placed one thumb in each of his antecubital fossae. John stepped in toward him, cupping what he could of the nape of that long, long neck.

"Come here," he said.

Sherlock's eyes were still open when John kissed him again, but his lips were expectant, parted and pondering. John placed the pad of his thumb beside the divot where Sherlock's lower lip flared, as if to test the reality of his own skin against it. Sherlock tilted away from it, but gently. The flicker of his tongue against the ridge of John's teeth made John hold his breath until it grew painful.

He exhaled hard through his nose as they broke, eyes still closed.

"I like the way you smell, John." The very first sign of hesitance in his voice. Sherlock had always had trouble getting his tongue around compliments. "Even if you do put product in your hair."

"That's the second-loveliest thing you've ever said to me," John said, opening his eyes and laughing.

"The second-loveliest thing you've said to me was two weeks ago," Sherlock said. "I remember it. You said you were fond of me."

"I remember it, too. Bloody difficult to forget. What's the first?"

"I assumed you were about to say it," Sherlock said.

"You surprise me. You always, always surprise me."

"I have no idea what that's supposed to mean," Sherlock said.

"Never mind."

John pushed aside the broad collar of the dressing gown, raising on tiptoe to tuck a kiss into the shadowed space above Sherlock's collarbone.

A protracted inhalation from above his head, punctuated by a slight whistle. Both ridiculous and lovely enough to make John laugh into Sherlock's skin. The sides of the dressing gown came unmoored from their ties and fell apart over an expanse of flesh like winter daylight. John moved his hands into the warm space between fabric and the hillocks of vertebrae he had mapped in his mind. He put his lips on skin that had just begun to flush and bud with sweat, every second a different place.

Hands still on his shoulders, Sherlock said, "Just so you know, I may disappoint you again." His tone was brusque, businesslike, a glimpse of the man John was more accustomed to.

"What? Oh, no, Sherlock. Trust me. You can't disappoint me." John passed his thumb over Sherlock's lips, gaining either a smile or a startle reflex. "Confuse, yes. Enrage sometimes. But never, ever disappoint. Whatever you do is what I want."

This was a revelation, and Sherlock allowed the gape-mouthed puzzlement to stay on his face. It was no wonder, really—conditions were his stock and trade, and there is nothing so inexplicable as unconditionality.

With the warning voiced and invalidated, John reached down to find Sherlock hard, the singular contours of his cock more palpable through the thin pants. Letting his mouth stay pressed against Sherlock's chest long enough to hear the stutter in his breath at the touch made John's own erection ache.

Giving Sherlock a moment of reprieve, John slid his fingertips below the waistband of the pants. "May I?"

"You don't need to ask." Sherlock made quite the effort to sound testy.

It gave John a bit of heart, though. Dealing with an uncertain Sherlock in day-to-day matters was satisfying as it was rare, but uncertain Sherlock whilst trying to initiate sex made John second-guess himself from moment to moment. Being uncertain as to whether Sherlock was certain or not presented a terrifying prospect in and of itself.

As John manoeuvred the pants over Sherlock's erection, a familiar and very _male_ scent drifted upward. Comforting, if a bit pungent—a little sour, a little dark. Sherlock had nearly as wild a thicket of hair surrounding his cock as he had on his head. Of course he would never have had occasion even to think about trimming or upkeep; it would not have been a concept to cross his mind. Still, it was quite a lovely thing John had his fingers wrapped around—not moving, just holding. The heat there in his hand, the vivid glow diffused to embers in a flush that mottled Sherlock's belly and thighs, reached long-fingered to paint his neck and cheeks.

John knelt and then slid Sherlock's cock into his mouth.

"Oh." This from over John's head. "Oh." They were soft exclamations of discovery, as if the elements of a riddle had fallen into place, offering up a solution. It was only discomfiting for a moment and then it made sense. To Sherlock, discernment and pleasure were one and the same.

John kept his movements shallow, holding in check a sudden wild possessiveness that would have mangled any delicacy.

"Stop, John."

John pulled away, looked up. "Not good?"

"No, good. I'm going to finish right now if you don't stop."

"That's all right," John said.

"I don't want to."

John stood up. "Do you want to try?"

"On you?" Sherlock asked.

John laughed. "Yes, on me."

"No," Sherlock said. "That is, not this time."

The corners of John's vision went blurry as he considered the very possibility of a _next time_. But he said, "Yes, that's fine, Sherlock. Next time. Perfect. Do you want to move somewhere more comfortable than the kitchen?"

"Your room," Sherlock said, stepping out of his discarded pants and leaving them where they lay. The effect of the flourish of dressing gown as he turned and walked toward the staircase was was at the same time dampened and oddly enhanced by the glimpses John caught of Sherlock's cock, shining wet and dipping with each step. It would be silly, if it wasn't making him nearly tear out his belt loops to get his trousers off.

John felt the groan of the stitches in his footsole as he took the steps two at a time.

The incongruity of a very naked Sherlock Holmes in his bed wearing the familiar expression of vague peevish frustration, as though he were the one whose patience was being tested, almost made John stop dead at the door. Almost.

John found his self-consciousness melted away a little under that measured and measuring gaze. The look at least was familiar territory, if not the dunescapes of bare skin stretched below. He shed his boxer shorts, and submitted briefly to Sherlock's appraisal.

The studied intensity shook loose when John sat beside him, placed a hand on the concavity of his belly where a thin path of crisp hair drew the eye downward to that unmanaged thatch. John hooked a hand in the sweat-christened hollow behind Sherlock's knee and drew his leg up. Set that unmarred foot on the coverlet.

He traced the arch with a finger until Sherlock said, "John."

"Sorry." Before he could think twice about it, he placed a kiss on Sherlock's kneecap.

Both men only breathed for a while, sat and breathed.

Then John reached over to trace an arc with his forefinger along the damp crease of hip and thigh, reversing direction below Sherlock's balls. It took the barest pressure to open him to John's touch, a single fingerpad massaging.

At last, a wash of pleasure that John could watch on Sherlock's face—not obliterating the impatient look, but eroding it with sea-fingers stealing it like sand. He wrapped one arm around Sherlock's knee, leaning in, then brought the finger back to his mouth to wet it.

Sherlock closed his eyes. John pressed his fingertip inside—no more—and was met with another sharp and wheezing inhalation. He found small movements sent widening and concentric ripples through Sherlock's body: the plane of his stomach fluttered, ribs flew around the anchoring sternum. His fingers danced on the bed.

"John."

"Does it hurt?"

"No. Just—that's all I wanted to say."

"Touch yourself," John said. "Please."

The clenching ache in his groin, now starbursting outward to suppress his breathing, doubled as John watched Sherlock reach toward his cock. It wasn't the act, but the fact of who was doing it that set John so off guard. With eyes closed, a man can still find his mouth, his eyes, with his fingertips. In a way, John had expected Sherlock to be less sure-handed in this most instinctual of motions. Slender fingers enfolded but did not move. Sherlock's eyes were violently closed.

John nudged his finger inward, to the second knuckle. Sherlock's body contracted around it and the hand on his cock did as well, and that was all it took. His exclamation was a sharp push of air through clenched teeth, the plosive trailing into a hiss. Sherlock raised his head, sent it crashing back to a pillow so deflated it lay nearly at the level of the bed. The quaver of agitated bedsprings reverberated up and through him, or so it seemed, directing the shiver of his hand and the flesh below.

The fluid was very pale across Sherlock's burning, burning skin.

John took up a corner of the bedsheet to clean it away.

Sherlock's eyes and mouth opened at the same time, lending him a naïve look that was comically out of character. "Oh," he said again.

John smiled. "Good?"

"Yes."

"Good."

Sherlock let his cock fall limp and passed the same hand across his brow. It served to dab away the sweat, but also deposited a sizable gout of semen at his hairline. John chuckled, and reached to dab it away with his thumb, bringing it to his mouth.

"You can, you know," said Sherlock.

"I can what?"

"You can fuck—"

"Right!" John barked, startling himself. "Yes, right." A blush prickled at his face. He wasn't certain he was ready yet to hear Sherlock pronounce that word. "I don't honestly know if I'll last that long."

"Well, _try_." The petulant emphasis was all Sherlock. A couple of orgasms and he was right back to his imperious self. It was a bit like finding a replica of one's own house—down to the contents of the larder and the laundry hamper—in another country.

The offended noise Sherlock made when John removed his finger to go retrieve the ID Glide lubricant and a condom from the bureau nearly made him lose control right there. Whether or not he got off on a bit of bossing about—even if only from Sherlock—was a subject for another time.

John returned to the bed—a landscape altered by the presence in it, all unexplored archipelagos, pink as light through the flange of a seashell. He settled again, this time between Sherlock's legs. At the snap of the bottle being uncapped, Sherlock let his head fall back again, as joyously selfish in the anticipation of pleasure as he was in the taking of it. But he was allowing John free rein to have his own, and that's what mattered.

"Tilt your hips up a bit," John said. "You can stop me at any time. Just say so."

"Stop fretting over me, John," Sherlock told him. "I'm not fragile."

"No," John smiled. "You're not." He laid an open-mouthed kiss to the inside of one thigh, where a flush drifted down in ebb, and slid the first finger in.

Keeping to Sherlock's exhortation became a task of sheer will. Sherlock was much more exuberant still than expected, his responses taking apart John's resolve brick by brick. He found he almost couldn't look at either his fingers as they moved or even at himself as he juggled the bottle of lubricant in his one unoccupied hand.

At last, John enfolded Sherlock's half-hard cock in his slick palm as recompense while he slid his fingers out. He let the brief notion of giving another warning pass unheeded. If Sherlock could get used to this, make a habit of chasing pleasure in well under lab rat time, then so could he. Still, propped up with one arm shaking with the effort, he pushed inside with as much care as possible. The intrusion earned no protest on Sherlock's part.

Pausing, savoring, _saving_, John bent once again to put his lips to Sherlock's, brushing recalcitrant fringe back from his forehead.

"I think you're meant to be doing something." Sherlock's breath smelt of the same masculine tartness as his body. The words were soft on John's mouth.

"Am I?" John tilted his hips forward, bringing one knee up on a pile of bunched bedcovers for leverage.

"That," said Sherlock, with likely less force than he intended.

John littered Sherlock's chin and neck with small kisses as he moved. Even keeping his thrusts shallow, he came after only a few, muffling the sound with a hum against Sherlock's skin, sent bouncing through the cavern of his ribcage.

"Thank you," John said after a moment. "Thank you."

He rolled away and, willing even breaths to return, rested his head on Sherlock's bicep. It was an untenable position; Sherlock would move—let John's head fall on one of the useless pillows—well before his hand went numb. But he let it be for the moment.

"Decompression sickness," Sherlock said.

"What?"

"The German tourists. At the home and garden show."

"Dear god, Sherlock."

"They had to get there somehow. And I assure you, they didn't swim the Channel. In the photographs from the scene I noticed the embroidery on the left breast panel of the man's parka. JAR-FCL. As in Joint Aviation Requirements Flight Crew Licencing. He was a recreational pilot. The parka was new—creases in the sleeves from folding. He wanted to show it off. The flight over from the continent was probably one of his first after receiving the licence. Likely done to impress his companion, who, while she was not significantly younger, showed obvious signs of plastic surgery. Quite probably a new relationship—wife shoved over for a better model. But you'll note, novice pilots are notoriously bad at altitude control. And small, twin-engine planes most often do not have pressurized cabins. The Germans certainly would have noticed some discomfort during the flight, pressure, popping ears, that sort of thing, but it would have eased on descent. One thing you need to know about decompression sickness is that when its cause is descent from high altitude, symptoms often do not manifest until a few hours after landing. Another thing you must know is that those same symptoms—"

"Can mimic carbon monoxide poisoning," John said.

"Utterly uninteresting," said Sherlock, pulling his arm out from beneath John's head. "And now, I suppose, since I've already seen you without your clothes, you won't need to find your dressing gown in order to go to the kitchen and make the tea."

John's laughter disturbed the taxed bedsprings again, a seismic ripple. "No, I suppose I won't. But I'm still not going in there without shoes."


End file.
